risk free bounty
a bounty that offers effort-based compensation to a DAO member that attempts a bounty in good faith; in an effort to convert a greater number of community members into contributors.
what is a "risk free bounty"?
it's a bounty that offers effort-based compensation to a DAO member that attempts a bounty in good faith; in an effort to convert a greater number of community members into contributors.
in nearly all organizations (DAOs included), humans rely on some form of credentialing + interviewing to make an acceptance decision on a new member. engineering additionally benefits from a mostly unbiased, quantitative coding challenge. traditional engineering based bounties are well suited for technical work, but the parallels within non-technical roles are lacking.
risk free bounties provide a mechanism something akin to a paid code challenge for engineers.
how can a DAO use a risk free bounty?
identify the core areas of the DAO that can utilize more talent.
identify the skills required to generate value in those areas.
develop projects that either directly reflect skill or would serve as a sufficient proxy.
break the project up into tasks that can be accomplished in chunks.
outline an objective criteria process to be analyze upon submission of bounty.
determine an enticing bounty quantity that is also nominal to the DAO.
publish risk free bounties to the community
assess submissions against #5 & grant bounties that display good faith effort.
optional: develop a tiered payout (good faith effort ↔️ applicable to production)
what's an example?
this idea was inspired by our onboarding challenges with krause house. we were still determining how we were going to accomplish our vision, which meant we still didn't exactly know what skills & talents we needed. we could guess. people could credential. people could persuade.
none of this was scalable & it has a bias to favor those who desire to credential & persuade.
this is still an ongoing experiment, but examples within the NFT opportunity space within a DAO might be:
NFTs
write a 1-pager outlining your favorite NFT project & why it has the potential to be the most interesting project in crypto.
target skill: product & strategy
objective criteria
did the author highlight reasons beyond the core project's pitch highlighting unique technology, social behaviors, or new applications?
was the author able to communicate a future world that understood a non-linear approach to growth in crypto or NFTs?
did the author exhibit creativity in their project selection or in their persuasion of why this might be the most interesting project in crypto?
build a 5 slide proposal of what NFT project you think krause house should embark on.
target skill: design, product, & strategy
objective criteria
did the author exhibit product strategy with their proposal?
does the design aesthetic of their proposal (mood board, examples, etc) reflect a novel approach?
was the proposal well thought out? did it make compelling points?
a good critique of these "objective criteria" would be are they actually valid indicators of analyzing the targeted skill? without exploring the philosophy of that question, the quick answer is no. the power here is to have consistent questions that a n of 1 or more can have a discussion on & eventually fine tune the criteria.
at the end of the day, we're attempting to reduce even worse methods of unstructured persuasion, credentialing, & interviewing.
feedback?
I'd love to hear ideas to this thinking. feel free to tweet me @thycommodore with thoughts, critiques, & suggestions. if anyone implements this, I'd love to have you on the pod to hear how it's going.